Bruce Handy on Culture

The Art of the Creep: When Good Movies Happen to Bad People

by Vittorio Zunino Celotto, from Silver Screen Collection, by Ian Gavan. All from Getty Images.

What happens when you learn, or are bluntly reminded after twenty-some years, that one of your favorite filmmakers may be a loathsome human being? Does it affect what you think of his movies? Does it dissuade you from watching them at all? These have been distant but oppressive questions, like a dark, low-hanging winter’s sky, in this, the season of Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow. Can you pry the art away from the artist’s cold, creepy hands? It’s certainly not the most important question on the table, but it’s one the news and the opinion pages have forced fans of Allen’s movies—and fans of other artists with problematic private lives, which is to say quite a few artists—to wrestle with.

This week, for instance, Slate published a provocative, thoughtful, and brave essay by the novelist and screenwriter Rafael Yglesias (1993’s Fearless; also, full disclosure, a friend of mine). The subject was his decision to collaborate with Roman Polanski on the 1994 film *Death and the Maiden,*despite Yglesias’s having been molested himself when he was eight. His choice, as Yglesias describes it, was fairly straightforward: a screenwriting job with Polanski “was an opportunity that was too rewarding to my artistic aspirations as a writer, and righteous refusal too vague in its benefits to society.” He later adds, “Working with a rapist is not the same as condoning rape.” (Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor in 1977. Read more about it in this October 2013 Vanity Fair article.)

But Yglesias goes on to explore how the abuses he suffered and his reactions to them, as both a child and an adult, have informed his feelings about Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen. He believes her. His attitudes towards Allen, whose films he cites as “the finest America has produced,” are more complicated: “I do not . . . share Dylan’s extension of the responsibility for punishing Woody Allen to filmmakers. Actors, writers, and producers are not cops, judges, or jurors. In the work they choose to do, writers, actors, producers, and directors can be held accountable solely for its quality and its ideas.” True, I think: there is often plenty of guilt to be apportioned on aesthetic grounds alone. And yet Yglesias isn’t quite ready to let Allen wriggle off the hook (if indeed there is a hook; personally, I’m agnostic on the question): “I do, however, wholeheartedly agree with Dylan Farrow that I should not honor a man’s so-called life achievement because I enjoy his movies.”

I agree in theory with the distinction Yglesias is drawing here—honoring the films, but not honoring the man himself. Or, conversely, not dishonoring the films because of antipathy toward their creator. But on screen there can be vast grey areas, especially in the case of a writer-director like Allen, who periodically references his own life in his films, whether directly, as in Annie Hall and Husbands and Wives (made with Mia Farrow while their family was exploding), or more abstractly in films such as Sweet and Low Down and Deconstructing Harry, which address the very conundrum of transcendent art made by morally vexing artists. One thing I know: I wasn’t as creeped out by Manhattan, where Allen’s middle-aged character is sleeping with Mariel Hemingway’s 17-year-old Dalton student, when I first saw it in 1979 as I am creeped out by it now, though it’s also a film that, for me, has proved better and more nuanced with each viewing. (In 1979, when I was 20, the relationship struck me, and I think many viewers, as maybe weird and exploitative but not necessarily criminal, somewhere between “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” and Lolita. And at the end of the film, of course, Hemingway’s character is presented as more mature than Allen’s, which could be read as a sick self-justification.)

Wednesday morning, in one of those serendipitous juxtapositions than can come with random reading (though “serendipitous” is probably not le mot juste), I went from Yglesias’s essay to TheNew York Timesobit for Shirley Temple Black, which recounted a troubling meeting between Temple and Arthur Freed, the producer and head of one of MGM’s legendary musical units. This was in 1941, when, by her account, the actress was 11, shortly after she signed with that studio (after being dumped by 20th Century Fox following a couple flops). I’ll let Temple herself tell it, from her 1988 autobiography, Child Star:

“First we get rid of the baby fat,” said the little man seated behind the wide desk. “Then new hair. Teach you to belt a song, and some decent dancing.” . . .

Best known as producer of the blockbusting The Wizard of Oz, Freed was rumored in some adult circles to have an adventuresome casting couch. At the time I knew none of this, not would I have recognized such furniture even when sitting on one. To visit an executive of such stature was enough to send my spirits soaring.

“I have something made for just you,” he continued, fumbling in his lap. “You’ll be my new star!” That phrase had last been used when I was three years old in Kid in Hollywood [one of Temple’s early shorts].

Obviously, Freed did not believe in preliminaries. With his face gaped in a smile, he stood up abruptly and executed a bizarre flourish of clothing. Having thought of him as a producer rather than an exhibitor, I sat bolt upright . . . Not twelve years old, I still had little appreciation for masculine versatility and so dramatic was the leap between schoolgirl speculation and Freed’s bedazzling exposure that I reacted with nervous laughter.

Disdain or terror he might have expected, but not the insult of humor.

“Get out!” he shouted, unmindful of his disarray, imperiously pointing to the closed door. “Go on, get out!”

Fortunately, as Temple points out, she had already signed her contract with MGM, and went on to make a number of films for the studio—none as successful as her childhood pictures, but she did get to co-star with the likes of Joseph Cotten and Cary Grant. Skimming her autobiography and reading her obits gives the impression that she was the best-adjusted, most levelheaded kid in the entire history (mostly disgraceful) of Hollywood child stars. But I can’t believe the experience with Freed wasn’t more traumatizing than she lets on in her breezy account. And, an even more disturbing question, how did he expect her to act, based on how many previous experiences with other children?

More questions: having heard this anecdote (assuming Temple is telling the truth—and what would a counter-narrative be?), does it change how we respond to The Wizard of Oz? Or Meet Me in St. Louis, Easter Parade, An American in Paris, and Singin’ in the Rain? Should it? (And can we watch any movie starring a young Judy Garland and not feel as if we’re witnessing a highly stylized from of child abuse?) Is one’s answer about Freed made simpler by the fact that he’s dead, that you can rent Easter Parade without fear of putting money in his coffers, just as you can buy books by Ezra Pound (anti-Semite) and Norman Mailer (wife stabber) without residual guilt? Myself, I declined to buy Michael Jackson records over the last two decades of his life, but I’ve also paid to see Polanski films—and he I know is guilty. Is that hypocritical, or at least inconsistent? Yes. Moral accounting so often is.

How much simpler it is for readers, filmgoers, and music lovers when atrocious people make equally atrocious art. Several years ago, as research for a story I was working on, I watched a number of Leni Riefenstahl’s movies, including her supposed masterpieces Triumph of the Will and Olympia. What a relief their tediousness was.